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CHAPTER 10

States of Exception: Gender-based Violence in the Global South

Sujata Moorti

December 2012, New Delhi, India Several men in a bus raped a 23-year-old woman, assaulted her and her friend, and abandoned them by the side of the road. Ten days later, the rape victim died of her injuries. People across India protested the rape and state inaction; they organized candlelight vigils and demonstrations even as the police wielded tear gas and water cannons to shut down the protests. The rape and the protests were covered extensively by Indian and international media. This moment became pivotal in opening the space for a wide-ranging discussion of the social, political, and institutional factors underpinning gender-based violence. February 2013, Bredasdorp, South Africa A 17-year-old cleaner at a construction company was raped, brutally assaulted, and left in the yard of a construction site. Six hours after naming one of her attackers, the rape victim died. National media covered the rape and there were a few protests across the country.

S. Moorti (*) Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, USA e-mail: smoorti@middlebury.edu

© The Author(s) 2018 D. Harp et al. (eds.), Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research, Comparative Feminist Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0_10 147

At first glance, these two rape cases share striking resemblances but, the responses they evoked and their ramifications have been sharply disparate. In this chapter I use these two moments to offer a critical analysis of news coverage of gender-based violence.

News media coverage of the rape victims in the two cases encapsulate the two poles scholars have identified: breathless accounts portraying the victim as a helpless martyr and the assailants as monstrous in the Delhi instance and those that focus on the victim, offering a variety of explanations for the violence and end up blaming the victim for the assault as in the Bredasdorp case. Analyzing United States news media in the 1980s, Helen Benedict used the pithy phrase “virgin or vamp” to characterize news media coverage of rape victims (1993; see also Meyers 1997). Benedict contended that whether the rape victim was portrayed as an innocent victim who did not deserve the assault or as a promiscuous vamp who could not be assaulted or at the very least deserved the attack, both strands of news coverage perpetuated harmful rape myths. Despite decades of feminist activism to raise consciousness about sexual assaults and gender-based violence, news media coverage about them continues to be mired in old tropes. Using news media coverage of the gang rapes in New Delhi and Bredasdorp, in this chapter I outline dominant trends that continue to prevail.1 I foreground as well digital media circuits and their feedback loops as I contend that these helped shape the differences in the South African and Indian media discourses.

Despite the differences, news coverage of the two instances shared some commonalities. Both India and South Africa are identified as countries with high incidences of sexual violence. News media, nevertheless, presented each of these instances of gang rape as exceptional and unique. I interrogate the cultural work conducted by such a narrative of exceptionalism and elaborate on feminist media criticism of this practice. I contend that by covering brutal instances of sexual assault and presenting them as exceptional, news coverage ends up undermining the goals of feminist activism that they seem to uphold. This paradoxical approach by news media is not new but has been amplified by digital media flows and has necessitated new tactics from feminists to combat gender-based violence. I map these toward the conclusion of the chapter.

Since at least the 1970s, feminists around the world have highlighted the prevalence of gender-based violence. They have addressed the cultural and structural factors that enable sexual violence. Feminists have attempted to dismantle rape myths,2 alter policing practices, and enact rape law

reform. In the United States, these activist efforts resulted in the establishment of rape crisis centers to assist victims, a series of initiatives such as the establishment of rape kits to ensure preservation of forensic evidence that could improve the chances of a successful prosecution of the assailant, the passage of new laws pertaining to the definition of sexual assault, and so on. In India and South Africa, feminist activism in the 1970s linked larger patterns of discrimination with the prevalence of sexual assault. For instance, in 1972 two Indian police officers raped a teenager named Mathura. The assault highlighted the prevalence of custodial rapes, instances where the police become the wielders of violence. A decade later the Supreme Court acquitted the police officers on the grounds that Mathura was a Dalit woman—member of the lower caste—“habituated to sexual intercourse” and her consent was thus voluntary (Chikarmane 1999). The media covered this court ruling extensively, especially the responses of feminists and civil liberty activists. The Mathura rape case is considered a key moment in Indian feminist history as it resulted in the emergence of a wide range of activist groups, such as the Forum Against Rape and Saheli. Feminists highlighted the poignant ways in which caste and class shaped Mathura’s experience of sexual assault even as the sexism central to the court ruling became the catalyst for action (see Sakhrani 2016). While the national media did not cover the initial assault, they reported extensively on the supreme court ruling and subsequent protests. In general, Indian media reporting of sexual violence has been sporadic and marked by sensational accounts adhering to the virgin/vamp dichotomy that Benedict posited, interspersed with long bouts of silence (Joseph and Sharma 1994). News coverage of the December 2012 gang rape shared some features with reporting on the Mathura court ruling. As I elaborate below, though, contemporary media narratives have presented sexual assault as more consequential.

In apartheid South Africa, feminist concerns about sexual assault were similarly shaped by concerns about how race and class shaped one’s experiences. They highlighted how white women’s rape claims were considered more credible than those of women of color, especially black women. Concomitantly, black men were presumed to be hypersexual and guilty of assaulting white women. Feminist activism in this instance has negotiated carefully the need to raise awareness about the prevalence of sexual violence even while cautioning against the ways in which the logics of apartheid shaped understandings of victim and assailant (see Russell 1996; Scully 2009). South Africa’s transition from apartheid was marked by the

development of a constitution that enshrined a commitment to gender equity; it integrated central principles from the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), a document that nominally mandates legal protections and state support for women’s rights.3 These changes, nevertheless, have not shifted significantly either the prevalence of gender-based violence or how sexual assaults are understood, within and across the color line (Scully 2009). Notably India is a signatory to CEDAW, but until recently rape laws were largely shaped by a penal code formulated during British colonialism.

RepoRting on niRbhaya Let us return to the two gang rapes that I referenced at the beginning of this chapter. In December 2012, a physiotherapy student had gone to see a film with a friend. They took a private bus back home after the movie; en route the two of them were attacked and the woman was raped by six men (one of whom was still a teenager and not legally an adult) and brutalized. The woman, whom the Indian media named Nirbhaya, died about two weeks later from injuries sustained during the rape attack.4 Initial news coverage was limited to a detailed enumeration of the violence inflicted on the woman as well as the police search for and arrest of the assailants. Subsequently, though, news coverage developed a twin focus, one on the health status of the rape victim and the other on the “spontaneous” protests that had erupted across the country; protesters sought justice and accountability from the state and condemned the state’s indifference to women’s quotidian vulnerability. The street protests were augmented by social media initiatives, such as petitions and hashtag campaigns. The One Billion Rising campaign described the social mobilization in India as a huge breakthrough of consciousness with regards to sexual violence (Watson and Lalu 2014). International news media too developed this doubled focus, highlighting the brutality of the attacks as well as the groundswell of protests. In both registers media coverage characterized the events as exceptional (Butalia 2014; Poell and Rajagopalan 2015; Roy 2014). In reality a number of rapes occurred within the same time period that were as brutal as or more brutal than the one involving Nirbhaya, but these did not garner the same kind of media attention or generate nationwide protests. Some scholars speculate that Nirbhaya encapsulated the aspirational model of citizenship central to contemporary India’s goals of being a key player in the global economy (Kapur 2013). Others contend

that one of the assailants was a Dalit and caste-based anxieties account for the groundswell of protests (e.g., Teltumbde 2017).5

What was exceptional about December 2012 was the response that it elicited. On a national level, the rape provoked a wide-ranging set of conversations about the status of millennial India. Some political leaders sought to curtail women’s mobility and freedom of expression arguing that working outside the home, going to the movies in the evening, and socializing with men accounted for the violence. The gang rape became a site from which media discourses contested people’s anxieties about the shifts in gender roles entailed by globalization processes. Most significantly, news media, especially in commentary and opinion sections, gave voice to feminist ideas rebutting rape myths. Feminists highlighted how the intersections of caste, class, and religious identity shaped understandings of sexual violence and criminality; they also signaled the complicity of the state, especially the police and judiciary, in maintaining structures of violence. Arjun Rajkhawa (2016) contends that Indian media offered an incisive and nuanced account of the “links between masculinity, masculine-making cultures, society’s patriarchal mindset, and women’s experiences of harassment, discrimination and violence” (para. 4).

As a result of the sustained protests, the Indian government instituted a three-person panel, the Committee on Amendments to Criminal Law—known colloquially as the Verma Commission—to review existing laws and make suggestions for legal reform. Scholars and activists have characterized this report as “the most progressive document” pertaining to women’s rights produced in independent India. The report enjoined the law to address a woman’s right to bodily integrity, sexual autonomy, and legal recognition of adult consensual sexual relationships. Lawmakers, though, sidestepped most of these recommendations and confined legal reform to a broader understanding of sexual assault (but one that still did not encompass marital rape). Legal scholar Ratna Kapur (2013) contends that the reforms that ensued have intensified the sexual security apparatus of the state to ensure the safety of women and left intact dominant gender arrangements. In 2015, the Indian government banned the screening of Leslie Udwin’s documentary, India’s Daughter, which renewed media coverage about Nirbhaya. Here again, the media moved quickly beyond censorship to hone in on rape in the Indian context.6 In effect, in media discourses Nirbhaya became a flashpoint of Indian gender justice.

South afRican “indiffeRence” Anene Booysen’s rape and death coverage in South Africa two months later offers a vivid contrast.7 Seventeen-year-old Anene was a cleaner in rural Berdasdorp. She went out with a group of friends to a local pub; they had some drinks, danced a bit, and Anene left the pub in the company of some male friends. She was found the next morning by a security guard at a construction site fighting for her life. Six hours after naming one of her attackers she died in a hospital. The case was covered by national news media, which tended to focus on the brutality of the attack. There were a few protests as well, including a march led by British singer Annie Lennox in Cape Town. But both the scale of media coverage and responses from the public and the political arena were limited. Some scholars contend that media coverage of Anene’s case tended to focus more on her disembowelment rather than the sexual assault (Davies 2014). As I have noted previously, unlike India, on paper South Africa’s policies with respect to gender are progressive. In response to this rape and murder the state reintroduced Sexual Offences Court, an initiative introduced in 1993 as a measure to improve the prosecution and adjudication of sexual offences. In addition, the government dedicated funds to improve job opportunities in rural South Africa.

As was the case with Nirbhaya, scholars have noted that the brutality of Anene’s sexual assault was not exceptional either; there were many similarly horrific incidents, none of which gained the same degree of attention. A 2011 study conducted by the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre found that the media attended only to the most brutal and shocking instances of sexual violence (cited by Watson and Lalu 2014). Further, media coverage tended to focus on the violence inflicted and was often devoid of a contextual analysis of gender-based violence. The reporting on Anene’s murder followed these trends and failed to locate this instance within the broader social context for women in rural South Africa. Media reports discussed Anene’s actions prior to her assault, nevertheless, a woman as victim discourse dominated and limited discussion to keeping women “safe” rather than considering the principles involved in eradicating gender-based violence, especially how to delink understandings of masculinity from violence. While media coverage of Nirbhaya continued well after her death, Anene’s attacks were displaced in the South African press by Reeva Steenkamp’s murder by her boyfriend. The celebrity status of “blade-runner” athlete Oscar Pistorius may account for some of the shift in attention, but “it is clear from the manner in which these two cases

were reported that class and race dynamics say much about whose life is deemed of greater value … For the media it seems that Anene Booysen was interesting only insofar as her body was a site for brutality and for the courtroom dramas that ensued after her death. Her thoughts and views, what she did and said, were deemed inconsequential and certainly not newsworthy” (Watson and Lalu 2014, 22).

Scholars across a variety of disciplines have found Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of exceptionalism to be generative in thinking through critically the principles of universalism and liberalism, particularly who is included and who is not in these concepts. While liberalism tend to position humans as rights bearing subjects, the principle of universalism extends this idea that every human subject is endowed with intrinsic dignity. Agamben’s formulation of homo sacer, sacred man, on the other hand, illustrates how the exclusion and elision of marked bodies from citizenship does not undermine the legitimacy of the liberal project but rather is constitutive of it. Feminist scholarship has developed further how gender and race are central to the production of marked bodies, spheres of exclusion, and the operations of sovereign power.8 Jasbir Puar (2004) has examined the cultural work conducted by the language of exceptionalism through a focus on the Abu Ghraib scandal. She contends that paradoxically the violence exhibited by American soldiers serves to secure United States imperialism and reposition the country as a haven of human rights. Informed by her writings I contend that news media rhetoric of exceptionalism in the two gang rapes I have discussed above operates on several interrelated planes. It helps posit that the particular gang rape under consideration is a rare form of violence, that the female body is granted the right to ownership of the body in democratic societies, and that the police and the judiciary are best equipped to contain brutal violence. Exceptionalism serves to obscure the vectors of class, race, caste as shaping the fields of visibility.

digital netwoRkS As many scholars and commentators have noted, in the Indian context the Nirbhaya protests were remarkable because people from diverse backgrounds were protesting on “a woman’s issue.” The street protests were supplemented with—and often mobilized by—activism conducted on social media. People turned to twitter to express their outrage about the prevalence of gender-based violence through a vari-